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Staff at the Castle Street store were left reeling by an announcement yesterday that the shop is likely to close on June 23.

Bosses blamed the decision to pull out of Carlisle on the economic downturn, which has led to the store racking up six figure losses.

But there was some hope for the 83 staff who work at Hoopers as managing director Anne Horton revealed that the firm, which has four other stores, said talks were underway with a number of possible future owners.

She said the potential buyers were nationally recognised stores groups.

The hope is that a new owner could take on staff as well as the building.

Miss Horton stressed that Hooper’s closure had nothing to do with it being in Carlisle, saying: “We are incredibly proud of all the staff here. Everybody has put so much into trying to make Hoopers in Carlisle successful.

“This could have happened anywhere.

“If we had opened somewhere else in the country at the time we did, heading into a recession which none of us knew about, we would have been in the same position, so you can’t lay the blame at Carlisle’s door.

“Our stores at Harrogate, Torquay, Wilmslow, and Tunbridge Wells, are all longer established than Carlisle. We could never have anticipated where we would be today. It’s the economic environment.”

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Four large Indian textile firms which make clothing for Dutch department store C&A and the Primark chain among others are still using child labour, according to Dutch multinational research institute Somo in Wednesday's Volkskrant.

The report says young teenage girls have been found working at the four firms which produce solely for the export market. Some girls are forced to work overtime or banned from leaving the factory compound. Others have part of their earning withheld for their dowry, the paper says.

Both C&A and Primark are among eight clothing companies which signed a joint reaction to the report, pledging to work with local organisations to end child exploitation.

'This is not window dressing,' a C&A spokesman is quoted as saying by the Volkskrant. 'We are actively looking for ways to tackle the problems, such as by warning the parents of 14-year-old girls about the recruitment tactics used by companies with a bad reputation.'